UBC president apologizes for ‘failing to confront’ over residential schools

UBC’s president opened the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre with an apology to survivors for the role UBC played in perpetuating a harmful system.

Santa Ono told a crowd that universities bear part of the responsibility for the history because they trained many of the policy-makers who administered the schools and tacitly accepted the silence surrounding it.

Ono says failing to confront a heinous history, even if the university didn’t cause it, would be to become complicit in the ongoing harm.